Will Eisner's noirish 1940s comic strip was an inspiration for Frank Miller creations such as Sin City. So it's a little ironic that most critics reckon this big-screen adaptation of The Spirit looks like a pale facsimile of the comic-book-writer-turned-director Miller's 2005 reworking of his own graphic novel.

Miller had the experienced Robert Rodriguez along for the ride on his previous outing. This time he's flying solo for the first time, and most reviewers seem to think it shows. The Spirit is stylistically pretty similar to its predecessor, but somewhere along the way, Miller has forgotten that no amount of slick CGI can polish a dull, mannered storyline and characters so feebly sketched out that the weakest gust of wind might send them to the four corners of Eisner's Central City.

"As in many comic adaptations, there's not much of a story," writes Empire's Kim Newman. "Miller invents a Wolverine-ish origin Eisner couldn't be bothered with – and supporting characters from various periods in the strip's run are crammed in almost at random. It also substitutes roof-running for action and misses much of the quirky charm and humanity of Eisner's originals."

"Miller directs with stunning ineptitude, shooting entire scenes in close-up without ever establishing the location, flashing from monochrome to colour without warning or reason, keeping his action sequences as perfunctory as possible to make way for endless, excruciating scenes of exposition," writes Time Out's Tom Huddlestone. "His work as a writer is, if anything, even worse, throwing in pretentious, portentous voiceovers, hammy gold-tinted flashbacks and repeated attempts at slapstick and comic wordplay which, without exception, fall deadeningly flat."

"The film flits endlessly, endlessly around its high-contrast, hyper-real urban jungle like a drunken tourist who has lost their way," writes our own Xan Brooks. "Ostensibly, this urban jungle inhabits the same neighbourhood as the one Miller rustled up in Sin City, although this time the thrill has gone. The place looks a lot less dangerous, a lot less fun. It's like Times Square after the developers got at it."

"Miller's 300 [he was an executive producer of the film of his own graphic novel] and Sin City showed a similar elevation of the graphic novel into fantastical style shows," writes Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times. "But they had characters, stories, a sense of fun. The Spirit is all setups and posing, muscles and cleavage, hats and ruby lips, nasty wounds and snarly dialogue, and males and females who relate to one another like participants in a blood oath."

For me, The Spirit played out like a sort of puzzled car crash of goofball camp and stern-eyed, noirish cool; an uncomfortable concoction of which we're likely to see a lot more as Hollywood desperately tries to squeeze every comic book it hasn't yet adapted into a Dark Knight-shaped mould. Eisner's lightweight tales have been hamfistedly shoehorned into territory much more dusky than the place they came from, and despite the similarities with Sin City, these stories don't entirely suit the brooding monochrome blueprint of Miller's own creation. This is an idiosyncratic comic-book universe that deserved to be filtered for the big screen through a bespoke celluloid prism. Instead it has had another film's vision tacked on in a one-size-fits-all approach that shows up Miller's lack of directing nous and makes the storyline's sillier elements look utterly incongruous.

But how about you? Did The Spirit look to you like a less pretty Sin City? Or was this one spectre you'd like to see laid permanently to rest?